Howard Thurman tells of being seven years old when his father died, and he has never forgotten the trauma he experienced when the guest preacher delivered a funeral sermon that did violence to his father's memory. That guest preacher handling the funeral had not known Saul Thurman. Yet that preacher dared to assess Saul Thurman's nonmembership in the local church the family attended as evidence that he was a nonbeliever, and he forthrighly declared him lost and in hell. That preacher wanted to make the occasion an object lesson for all who were "outside the church."
As young Howard sat on the mourner's seat, he kept saying to his mother beside him, "He didn't know Pappa? Did he? Did he, Momma?" Alice Thurman, Howard's mother, held her calm through the service and gently patted her son's knees to comfort him as the verbal violence ate away at his young mind and spirit. It was the handling of that sermon by that preacher, Thurman tells us, that turned him against the church for awhile during his youth. Lacking intimacy with the family, that preacher would have been wiser and more helpful if he had chosen to comfort the family rather than interpret the life of the deceased. That preacher used the occasion as an evangelistic opportunity. This type of sermon is common among fundamentalist Christian preachers.
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(Source: Excerpt taken from Designing the Sermon: Order and Movement in Preaching, by James Earl Massey. William D. Thompson, editor, pp.78-79)
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